A Foundation Model for Food, with Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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Patrick surfaces conversations with experts who actually built and understand the complicated but not unknowable systems we rely on. You might be surprised at how quickly Patrick and his guests can put you in the top 1% of understanding for stock trading, tech hiring, and more. Subscribe to Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie everywhere you get your podcasts or at the link in the description.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:41)
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a pioneering company that's taking on one of the biggest challenges and commercial opportunities in AI today. How to incorporate the latest advances into embodied systems so that they can reliably handle the diversity of real-world contexts and deliver practical economic value.
Chef focuses on food assembly, which I was surprised to learn constitutes an estimated 70% of labor costs in food manufacturing facilities, more than in ingredient preparation and cooking combined. And Chef Robots have now assembled some 20 million meals. In this conversation, Rajat shares a detailed account of Chef's technology, including the form factor of their robots, their use of imitation learning, the tremendous efforts they've made to ensure consistency in dynamic environments, their multi-layered strategy for resolving production issues, the data flywheel effects they are beginning to see, and how they are leveraging that data to create a new foundation model for food manipulation.
Looking ahead, Rajat sees Chef's robots moving into commercial kitchens of all kinds and believes we will ultimately see a reorganization of the food industry with a proliferation of cheaper and more customizable meal options produced in robotic ghost kitchens and delivered by small autonomous drones. Perhaps surprisingly, in contrast to the more familiar Jetson-style vision of domestic robots that cook for us in our homes, Rajat envisions a world in which the cost of high-quality food approaches the cost of ingredients and thus home kitchens become an optional add-on for hobbyist home chefs. As someone who is always looking for realistic glimpses of daily life in the AI-enabled future, I found this vision quite thought-provoking, and it's inspired me to think about what other second-order effects we might ought to expect.
As always, we appreciate it when listeners share the show, and we'd love to hear your feedback. You can contact us via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or you can DM me on your favorite social network. And briefly, if you're an AI engineer or an AI advisor who's excited about helping diverse real economy businesses apply AI technology, or if you're interested in sponsoring the Cognitive Revolution, I would be excited to hear from you. Now, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics. Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, welcome to the Cognitive Revolution.

**Rajat Bhageria** (3:28)
Thank you, Nathan. I'm super excited to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:30)
I am too. This is cool. We've done obviously a ton of episodes on a ton of different things, including a few on robotics research, but I think this is the first time that we'll have an opportunity to talk about a product that is deployed at some non-trivial scale in the robotics wild. So I'm excited to get into that with you.
I guess for starters, you want to just give us the very high level overview of what is Chef Robotics and then I'll dig into all the technical and socio-technical nooks and crannies from there.

**Rajat Bhageria** (4:01)
Yeah, that sounds good. So yeah, Chef Robotics, we make AI-enabled robots for the food industry.
We're starting with actually food manufacturing and that's because it's actually a very kind of relatively good place to collect training data, add ROI to customers, and we can talk more about the nuances of that, but it's a really good starting point where we can kind of relatively quickly ship robots, it's like L2 autonomy, you could say, in the AV parlance, and we can generate ROI for our customers and of course, the more robots we deploy in this area, the better that our chain data set gets and our AI gets, which then allows us to have a more dextrous system, which then allows us to do hopefully more complex applications, such as Ghost Kitchen, such as Fast Casuals, etc. The ultimate goal, of course, is to deploy an AI-enabled robot in really every commercial kitchen around the country and the world. So that's broadly what we're doing, of course, from there.